Frenemies

“A sincere diplomat,” Stalin once said, “is like dry water or wooden iron.” As any diplomat knows, the role requires a doubleness not just of message but of manner—an extra slathering of the flatteries and false civilities that grease the wheels of all human dealings. Of course, when presenting more than one version of oneself, one always runs the risk that wires will get crossed and hypocrisies will be exposed, resulting in hurt feelings. That’s what happened last week, when WikiLeaks released a cache of secret State Department cables containing some memorably snarky assessments of politicians who are, in public, at least, friends of the United States: Nicolas Sarkozy is an emperor with no clothes who has a “thin-skinned and authoritarian personal style”; Prince Andrew speaks “cockily” and is “rude”; Angela Merkel is “rarely creative.” Frenemies don’t fare so well, either: the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi is described, in one memo, as relying on the aid of a Ukrainian nurse who is a “voluptuous blonde” and, in another, as “just strange”; a Singaporean envoy is quoted referring to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il as a “flabby old chap” who “prances around stadiums seeking adulation”; and Robert Mugabe is called a “crazy old man.” Oops.

Foreign-policy experts are debating whether the leaks constitute a threat to national security, but their diplomatic damage is familiar to any civilian who uses e-mail. To read the cables was to experience all over again the feeling of receiving an e-mail and passing it on with a comment like “WHAT AN IDIOT!!!!!!”—only to realize, too late, that one has hit “Reply” instead of “Forward.”

“It puts the fear of God in me,” the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt said last week. The WikiLeaks news had brought to mind the opening scene of “King Lear,” in which two of Lear’s daughters, Regan and Goneril, engage in a contest to see who can flatter their father more effusively, in order to win the biggest dowry. (The third sister, Cordelia, stays out of it, saying that she won’t practice their “glib and oily art.”) The first two profess their love for the King extravagantly—“I love you more than words can wield the matter / Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty”—but, as soon as he’s out of earshot, they turn frosty. Greenblatt recited the exchange:

GONERIL: You see how full of changes his age is. . . .

REGAN: ’Tis the infirmity of his age: yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.

GONERIL: The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash.

The shocking thing about the sisters’ comments, Greenblatt said, is not their severity but their abrupt shift in tone. “It’s the coolness,” he said. “Their words are stripped of the affect with which we normally address each other.” He noted that the scene is an exaggerated version of all human interactions—we’re all diplomats, offering one assessment of our friends to their faces and a slightly cooler version when they’re not in the room or on the e-mail chain. This doesn’t make us liars. “What you say directly to your friend is very different from what you say behind your friend’s back, but that’s not the whole truth of the matter,” he said. “Sometimes the whole truth of the matter includes the warm, loving relations, too.”

Actual diplomats are perhaps more two-faced than the rest of us. A former British U.N. diplomat, Carne Ross, observed that “there is an extraordinarily rich vein of gossip inside diplomacy.” Not only is there a lot to gossip about—Qaddafi’s nurse, for instance—but diplomats tend to think of themselves as élite, and they regard politicians as “cheap and tacky.” Ross said that there is a tradition of including, in diplomatic memos, “saucily penned portraits about what these people are like in private.” Such asides have caused problems in the Internet age, even without the aid of WikiLeaks. Nigel Sheinwald, the British Ambassador to the U.S., got in trouble when someone leaked a telegram that he’d sent home describing Barack Obama as “aloof,” “insensitive,” and “decidedly liberal.” Ross, who runs a nonprofit group called Independent Diplomat, which dispenses advice on diplomatic strategy, said, “The old days are over. What you say in private is going to have to match up with what you do in public a little better than it has in the past.”

But isn’t there a purpose to such duplicity in life, if not in diplomacy? Anthropologists have long argued that talking behind people’s backs plays an important role in social relations. John Haviland, the author of “Gossip, Reputation and Knowledge in Zinacantan” (an indigenous community in Mexico), pointed out that getting the dirt on someone can be helpful for a leader making a personnel decision. “There is a serious processing of information there,” he said. Furthermore, he added, a world in which people were always uniform in their social interactions would be “kind of sad.” He went on, “It’s not necessarily about what information comes out in gossip sessions. It’s about what side of yourself you’re able to reveal, and this nuance—the texture of social life—comes from having intimate friends and more distant friends. You’re always doing that calculus. There’s emotional satisfaction in being able to filter—and vent.” ♦

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